How Do We Prepare Students For Jobs That Don’t Exist Yet?

Education has truly come a long way. However, it still has a very long way to go. Thanks to social networks like Twitter, teachers are able to collaborate and share resources like never before.

But what about students? How do these well-connected teachers prepare students for the coming decades? According to Sir Ken Robinson, we don’t even know what to actually prepare students for. In fact, he says actually connecting with students is getting increasingly harder thanks to all the new technology and distractions.

A recent talk delivered by Sir Ken Robinson has been transformed into an engaging and artistic ‘live animation’ by RSA and is embedded below. He touches on just about everything that it’ll take to prepare students for the next step in their lives.

This discussions raises some interesting questions that I have personally been wondering about. For example, how do we prepare students for jobs that don’t even exist yet? How do we get students excited about industries that haven’t been invented yet? I graduated college in 2004 and only a handful of friends took any classes dealing with computer science. Now, the vast majority of my friends are involved with computer science despite their lack of undergrad training.

So how do we adequately prepare students for what’s next? Sir Ken Robinson outlines some key points and has gotten me thinking. I hope it simply does the same for you. Enjoy.

When you say your friends are involved in computer science, do you mean programming, engineering or IT, network administration? These are very different fields of study and career tracks. The former with a bachelor’s degree has three semesters of calculus and a lot of engineering, statistics. The latter requires very little hard math.